24.4.04

I recently happened upon an interesting set of literary portraits from Le Point, and six articles on French surrealist author Louis Aragon (from an issue of the magazine in 1997, in honor of the centenary of his birth) got me thinking about Aragon again. One of my favorite books so far in the Paris Reading Project (see the bottom of the sidebar at right) was Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (1926), a loving portrait of Surrealist Paris in the 1920s. Toward the beginning of the book, Aragon sets the tone of the surrealist movement by banishing reason (p. 13, with my translation):

Reason, reason, oh abstract phantom of last night, I had already chased you from my dreams, here I am at the point where they are going to be confused with the realities of appearance: there is no more room here for anything but me.

The rest of the book stays true to this opening, with very little that could be called plot or character development. The real protagonist is the city of Paris, the passages and urban landscape in the first part and, in the second half of the book, the park of Les Buttes-Chaumont. In the former, he describes the place where he lives, a hotel in one of the covered passages that mostly functions as a brothel, all of which was torn down in the demolition to make way for the new Boulevard Haussmann (p. 21, with my translation):

The modern light of the unexpected . . . reigns strangely in these sorts of covered galleries, which are numerous in Paris around the broad boulevards and which one calls in a troubling way "passages," as if in these corridors hidden away from the day, no one was permitted to stop for more than an instant. . . . The powerful American instinct, imported into the capital by a prefect of the Second Empire [Baron Haussmann], which seeks to cut up the map of Paris again with lines, will soon make impossible the preservation of these human aquariums already dead to their former life and which deserve to be seen as the repositories of several modern myths, for only today, as they are threatened by the pickaxe, have they become effectively the sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, have they become the ghostly landscape of pleasures and of condemned professions, once incomprehensible and which tomorrow will never know.

The book includes an affectionate and rather detailed description of the Café Certa, the hangout of the surrealist circle, from which it could be reliably reconstructed. (It may already have been, as there is a place in Paris bearing this name—at 5, rue de l'Isly, in the 8th—anyone been there?)